2008/12/23, Four PM

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We spent time near Christmas at a family farm near
Esterhazy
in Saskatchewan. Regular readers will know that I enjoy photographing this
part of the world. On December 23rd, as the clock marched toward four in the
afternoon and the December sun (at 50°39'12"N) neared the distant flat
horizon, I resolved on a photo-walk. It was around -30°C with a mild but
painful breeze in the fast-changing
light; one of the most intense experiences in my 2008.
Herewith eight pictures, mostly of snow.

I was wearing: Ordinary underpants, an ordinary T-shirt from a trade show
with a high-tech logo,
thin ordinary socks inside and outstanding merino-wool socks
from Three Vets outside,
over them a tough pair of
Zamberlan walking shoes that look
deceivingly like sneakers,
black jeans from
Cowtown, a
really warm sweater, a thick fuzzy wool toque that
Lauren knitted, a down-filled parka
that I inherited from
my father, and as for my
hands, that’s next.

I wanted to take pictures so my hands had to be usable without freezing too
fast. I had loose ratty old leather-palm-canvas-back workgloves,
and then Lauren bought a nice modern slinky fleece pair that
fit right under them. With that combination I could carry the
camera and operate the controls enough to get by.

Examining these photos’ metadata will reveal they span a period of only
about twenty minutes, but you have to more than double that to get away from the
buildings into the fields, and then back. My hands were screaming for mercy
when I came in, and the grip on the camera was clawlike not delicate, but
still, the glove combo did the job, and I’m thankful.

The prairies, well, they’re big. So all of these photos are the result of
pointing my nice Pentax
21mm “Limited”
wide-angle here and there. Yes, the colours and contrasts have been
enhanced a bit, but—I claim
photointegrity—only to
look more like what I remember seeing. Yes, the shades shifted every three
minutes and every direction you looked.

English just doesn’t have words to describe cold of that intensity. I was
appropriately dressed but am still a mild-climate West Coast Wimp, and the cold
hurt me wherever it touched me; and it tried really hard to find chinks in my
clothing’s armor to penetrate and hurt.

There are colder place in the world, but very few where people choose to
live. Which is understandable but a pity, the cold comes with clear air and
this sort of beautiful afternoon.

There aren’t many “family” farms now, the countryside is emptying out as
the quarter-sections (that means 160 acres) consolidate by dozens and
hundreds, and the people who operate the resulting vastnesses want to live in
town, as people mostly do.
In the city or near it, every step takes you as
much toward others as away from them. Not here; each
step is a step away and will have to be echoed by a step homeward unless you
want to sample the (not unpleasant, they say) flavor of death by hypothermia.

On this walk, part of my mind was thinking about
interesting pictures. The rest was worrying about whether I should
terminate the photowalk and head for the farmhouse. Because, after a
half-hour’s hard trudge for healthy legs over the broken frozen fields, if you
trip over a frozen cow-turd and unfortunately break an ankle, well, you might
have just given your life for art.

A tiny part of my mind was saying, back in a remote corner of the skull,
“hop another fence, keep chasing that horizon” and I couldn’t be sure
whether that mental faction was about really great photos or just
next-exit nihilism. The voice didn’t really have a chance to convince me, but
it it was interesting to hear. If I
weren’t generally both lucky and thick-skinned I imagine it might be louder.

I’ll close with a quotation from
Little, Big by
John Crowley which on
alternate Thursdays I think the finest novel ever written in English. The
quote comes with a title: Brother North-Wind’s Secret. And the secret
is: “If Winter comes, Spring can’t be far behind.”

And I can report first-hand that right now in the mild Pacific Northwest,
in the first days of February, there are green shoots to be seen in the
corners of our garden, promising small glories of violet and gold before too
much longer.

Thanks for the pictures. My Dad grew up in the same area, in a farm outside Rosthern, SK. I was talking to him recently about it. His family lived in a small, uninsulated(!!) farm house. I (a fellow West Coast wimp) can't begin to imagine how difficult the winters would be under those conditions.

Here in Burnaby, even though we still have ankle-deep snow in our front yard (it hasn't snowed substantially in a month -- but our house shades the yard, and we had a LOT of snow), this morning we were startled by a woodpecker banging away on our kitchen's metal stove vent pipe. Maybe the same guy as last year, who didn't show up until late March:

Living in Fairbanks, Alaska, I have an idea about the temperatures you are talking about, at times actually colder than that. Our advantage is the usually non-existing wind chill. Makes all the difference in the world. Especially in nice, clear nights when you want to take pictures of the aurora.

In case you want to rescue your hands from the cold while still admiring nature: hand warmers. Their are air activated and you just stick them into your gloves. And of you go for another photo session. You should be able to find them in any outdoor store. Should be part of any survival gear in winter.